Firefox goes multiprocess: Some years back, Mozilla embarked on the Electrolysis project to give Firefox a multiprocess architecture, where each web page ran in its own process. This idea isolates web pages from crashing each other and should have performance benefits too; Google’s Chrome, for example, was built with such an architecture. Unfortunately, a year later Mozilla put that effort on hold to work on things which would give quicker returns. Well, now it’s 2013 and the project in back and already in the nightlies. A full write up on Multiprocess Firefox is available in Bill McCloskey’s blog which explains there’s no release date for this work yet, how to enable it if you want to try it out and how things will break and how add-ons are affected.

Kexec and Secure Boot: Matthew Garrett has written up why kexec is disabled in Fedora when booted with Secure Boot enabled. Worth a read as it shows why being able to swap kernels in such an environment is a bad thing.

Poison for GCC: One thing Microsoft have done well is providing red lights for dangerous function calls (like strcpy and sprintf) in their tools (by adding a header file banned.h). Now, Leaf Security Research are creating a version for GCC with a Github project to create a “gcc-poison.h” file. Using it could help developers find those nasty vulnerable, error-prone functions hidden in their code base.

OpenNebula 4.4 goes “Retina”: The other other open source cloud platform, OpenNebula, has just been updated to version 4.4, codenamed Retina (after the Retina Nebula – this project has the best codenames). The update supports multiple datastores with scheduling policies to spread loads across different VMs and their associated storage. For more details, check the release notes.